Map of the Rotating Regional Plan. Red is East, Yellow is Midwest, Green is South, and Blue is the West region.

The plan provides that the individual state primaries (or caucuses) would be grouped into 4 regions, each region voting in a different month--either March, April, May or June. Individual states in a region would vote on or soon after the first Tuesday of their month, though not necessarily on the same day. The first year, the order would be determined by lottery, and subsequently rotate for each election.

To continue traditional early primaries in Iowa and New Hampshire, they would be permitted to hold their primaries or caucus before any of the regions.

Regional Groupings:

East: Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, West Virginia and the District of Columbia.

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Both the Republican and Democratic parties have been lukewarm to the concept. In 2000, the Republican National Committee's Advisory Commission on the Presidential Nominating Process passed over the Rotating Regional plan in favor of the Delaware Plan. In 2005, the Democratic National Committee's Commission on Presidential Nomination Timing and Scheduling ranked it ninth on a list of ten priorities, just above keeping the status quo.

Also, several of the regions (most notably the South and East regions) show significant political bias one way or the other. Overall, this may be seen as a liberal bias: the South is quite conservative, the Midwest is neutral, the West is moderately liberal, and the east is more strongly liberal. With 2 liberal-leaning regions vs. only one conservative-leaning region, in more elections the parties may be tilted toward liberal candidates. This flaw can be corrected with politically neutral regions, mentioned below.

Map of same-sized politically balanced regions. All 4 regions voted between 48% and 53% (and between 48% and 59% of electoral votes) for the GOP in the most recent election. Note loss of contiguity in the red and green regions.

One criticism of the regional system is that the East is a very liberal region, while the South is very conservative. Given the stability of the voting patterns over the last several elections, regions might be balanced politically, at the possible cost of some contiguity. For example, instead of including Pennsylvania, Maryland and New Jersey in with New York and New England, a balanced region might bounce over to Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky instead. There would be a loss of regional identity, and non-contiguous regions, but there would be a gain of political balance.

In a given election, after the first and second regions have held primaries, the remaining two regions can be combined to hold a final primary. This would shorten the primary schedule, and leave no "fourth primary" likely scheduled after the nominees have been selected.